When these words were written everybody had read or heard of Simon Suggs, the shifty man whose antics had been recorded in many a gusty tale of Alabama frontier life which had drawn laughter and applause from newspaper readers throughout the United States. And everybody, at least in Alabama in the 1850s, knew something about his creator, Johnson Jones Hooper...The immortal Suggs, his alter ego, has kept his name alive and renewed its luster, in a biography that deserves almost unqualified praise.